Air
Water
Food
Shelter
Companionship
Energy
Knowledge
Think carefully about how you would secure these essentials for yourself and those you care about if industrial civilization were to collapse.
It’s an uncomfortable truth, but a truth nonetheless: under natural conditions, the Earth’s ecosystem could sustain about 10 million humans. Take a moment to reflect on how we’ve managed to balloon to 8.2 billion.
The remaining wilderness, where our natural capital resides, is vanishingly small. The biosphere is groaning under the weight of our demands. Our civilization is like an inverted pyramid—its tiny tip is nature, and we, with our sprawling cities, industries, farmland, and mountains of waste, teeter precariously on its broad base.
Do you honestly believe that politicians are capable of halting these global crises? Natural processes are incomprehensibly more powerful than we are.
We don’t have much time to secure the long-term survival of our species. The choice is yours: will you be a guardian or a parasite? The masks are falling; all our pretensions and false privileges are laid bare.
I don’t like what I see emerging. It’s a personal loss to witness what humanity truly is. This isn’t what I signed up for; this isn’t what I was taught to believe. Damn it.